The project will give you an opportunity to apply what you learn in class (especially computational thinking practices and testing/documentation best practices) in a more realistic application than...

The project will give you an opportunity to apply what you learn in class (especially computational thinking practices and testing/documentation best practices) in a more realistic application than toy problems. You will develop a solution to a real-world problem that interests you (some samples will be provided to you). The exact problem you choose is open-ended, as long as it conforms to at least one of three application areas that are relevant to information science: data analysis, search, or web services.
There will be 5 components to the project:• 1 initial project proposal: a document that describes a formulation of your problem in computational terms, along with your timeline and step-by-step plan.• 3 progress updates (including current state of the code).
• 1 final project submission.


Assessment on this project will be process-centric: your grade will heavily focus on assessing the extent to which you are effectively using computational thinking techniques, including computationally formulating problems, using decomposition and abstraction, and practicing good software engineering techniques like quality testing (e.g., testing for edge cases) and effective documentation. It is possible that some of you may choose problems that turn out to be too difficult to solve (although we will work hard to make sure that your chosen problems are scoped well enough that you have a good chance of succeeding): if this happens, don’t worry! As long as you are doing a good job of following good processes, you should be able to do well on this assessment.